Let’s compare Stroud with other similar quarterbacks
Anyone who is a regular reader of this feature knows I am a lover of numbers. It is important to understand why. There is conventional wisdom and popular narratives that people love to trumpet as if it is gospel. We trumpet it as if it is fact and use that to justify claims that may be unrealistic when compared to the actual facts.
In football, there can be no other situation where this happens more often than with quarterbacks. Some of this is pure numbers and logic. We talk about this quarterback and that quarterback being a top ten quarterback. I heard someone call Baker Mayfield a top ten quarterback. This is a crazy thought and please follow me closely here. There can only be ten top ten quarterbacks. I know it’s a crazy notion.
This comes into play when we start talking C.J. Stroud. Is he a top ten quarterback? He sure wasn’t last season. He may have been in his rookie season, but he certainly wasn’t one last season. However, this kind of falls into a narrative. How often do we hear about the sophomore slump? How often do we hear about a quarterback really taking off in year three? How often does this actually happen?
So, what I did is take a look at quarterbacks that were taken in the top three since 2000. I eliminated a couple like JeMarcus Russell because, well, he didn’t even make it to year three. I simply took their ratings from year one, year two, and year three and averaged them together to get an aggregate.
We can answer a couple of questions from the outset. First, is the narrative about a sophomore slump being the norm even true. Furthermore, is the narrative about a significant bounce from year two to year three true? Secondly, we can look at all 18 such quarterbacks and see who Stroud is the most similar to.
I simply love the concept of similarity scores. It helps cut through the “top ten quarterbacks” or “quarterback tiers” nonsense and simply compare a quarterback we have an emotional attachment to and compare him with other quarterbacks who we don’t. Following the season, the Texans will be able to offer Stroud a huge extension. Is he worth it? We can partially answer that question by asking ourselves if we would have wanted the quarterbacks he is most similar to.
The Overall Results
Like I said, we looked at 18 quarterbacks taken in the top three of the draft since 2000. We looked at only their ratings because it is an easy number to track and is a fairly useful number that is pretty portable over time. Obviously, any good analyst could poke holes in this analysis, but we are trying our best to confirm or dispel certain narratives.
Year One Average: 79.3
Year Two Average: 88.1
Year Three Average: 88.9
Aggregates can be affected by scores that skew the results. So, in addition to averages we can look at individual scores. How often did scores go up and down out of the 18. Between year one and year two, only four of the 18 quarterbacks saw their QB ratings go down. That happened only six times between years two and three. So, the whole idea of the sophomore slump appears to be a myth.
Obviously, that means that the idea of spiking from year two to year three is also a myth. While most of the quarterbacks improved from year two to year three (12 out of 18), the overall improvement was not necessarily significant. Vince Young’s tumble probably has something to do with the overall numbers being skewed, but even if we remove his bad rating, we get a 90.5 rating in year three which is not a significant change.
Similarity Scores
Like I said, I know quarterback rankings and quarterback tiers are a nice and easy way to get clicks, but I’m not sure how helpful they are. Is C.J. Stroud a top ten quarterback? Like I said, he was one year and not the next. If we were actually doing this right, we would find that there might be very little continuity in the lists from season to season versus what talking heads actually put in their personal rankings.
We are going to do this three ways. First, we will look at year one and take the three or four quarterbacks closest to him. Second, we will look at the second year and do the same things. Finally, we will look at the two years combined and come up with that list of names. If we start seeing the same name multiple times then it is a pretty good indication that a player is similar to Stroud.
Year One: Robert Griffin III, Baker Mayfield, Phillip Rivers, Joe Burrow
Year Two: Andrew Luck, Cam Newton, Jameis Winston, Sam Darnold
Average: Philip Rivers, Kyler Murray, Carson Palmer, Robert Griffin III
The idea is to remove emotional attachment. Out of the names mentioned, there is only one career I would sign up for. River is a likely Hall of Famer and a guy we would probably take during his prime. Additionally, we also see Griffin twice as well. Injuries obviously derailed his career, but I think the first two seasons seem pretty analogous so far.
So, if we want to break this down we will ask a simple question: how many of the names above would you pay top of the market QB prices to? Burrow seems to be an obvious yes since he did get top of the market money. Rivers seems to be a lock for the Hall of Fame, so he would be another. The rest of them are probably a hard no.
Obviously, the future is unwritten. We don’t know what Stroud will do next year and he if he can rekindle that magic he had in year one. If he pumps in another 100+ rating season then he seems to be a lock for that long-term, big money extension. What seems more likely is a mixture of year one and two. In that case it will be a very tough decision.